TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Demographic Traps

A long time ago, I came to the
stunning conclusion that the earth could readily support a population of 100
billion people.It meant managing every
square mile of land intensely and cleverly.This still preserved the wild and conserved diversity while creating
soils everywhere using biochar and atmospheric water as needed.This all required an ample human population
naturally involved with the agricultural process throughout their lives.

There has never been a
demographic trap.And after the Earth
has been fully terraformed and reasonably optimized, there is underground
habitats, space habitats and terraforming Venus for another trillion or so
people if we so desire.

I wish someone would take a
square mile of land in Africa with a few dozen
or so farmers and simply agree to match their sales receipts on a dollar by
dollar basis to see just how much that square mile is able to produce over a
number of years.Somewhere there is a
natural limit, but I bet we will end up very surprised to discover were we find
it.

Out of the Demographic Trap:

Hope for Feeding the World

In Africa and elsewhere, burgeoning
population growth threatens to overwhelm already over-stretched food supply
systems. But the next agricultural revolution needs to get local — and must
start to see rising populations as potentially part of the solution.

I bring good news from Machakos, a rural district of Kenya, a couple of hours
drive from Nairobi.
Seventy years ago, British colonial scientists dismissed the treeless eroding
hillsides of Machakos as “an appalling example” of environmental degradation
that they blamed on the “multiplication” of the “natives.” The Akamba had
exceeded the carrying capacity of their land and were “rapidly drifting to a
state of hopeless and miserable poverty and their land to a parched desert of
rocks, stones and sand.”

Since independence in 1963, the Akamba’s population has more than doubled.
Meanwhile, farm output has risen tenfold. Yet there are also more trees, and
soil erosion is much reduced. The Akamba still use simple farming techniques on
their small family plots. But today they are producing so much food that when I
visited, they were selling vegetables and milk in Nairobi,
mangoes and oranges to the Middle East, avocadoes to France,
and green beans to Britain.

What made the difference? People. They made this transformation by utilizing
their growing population to dig terraces, capture rainwater, plant trees, raise
animals that provide manure, and introduce more labor-intensive but
higher-value crops like vegetables. For them, “multiplication” of their numbers
has been the solution rather than the problem. They have sprung the demographic
trap.

The story of Machakos convinces me that humanity is not done yet — our
ingenuity may still save us from succumbing to planetary limits, and we can
feed a growing world population.

For most of human existence, the land appeared limitless. Whenever populations
grew too large for comfort, societies occupied new land. But by the 1960s, most
of the best land was taken and the frontiers were being pushed up inhospitable
mountainsides onto poorer soils, and into the last tropical rainforests.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Paul Ehrlich famously declared in his 1968 book, The
Population Bomb, in which he predicted widespread famine because of
overpopulation.

But human ingenuity stepped in. In the past half century, thanks to the “green
revolution,” the world has added just 10 percent to farmland but more than
doubled food production.

What next? The world was brought up short in 2008 by soaring food prices on
international markets. Politicians were unnerved as food riots broke out in
more than a dozen countries. Prospect magazine headlined “The Return
of Malthus.” We may now be able to feed nearly 7 billion people. But world
population is expected to reach 9 or 10 billion later this century. Can we feed
them all?

Pessimists have a point. We are undermining agriculture by damaging water and
soils. We use more than half of the world’s river flows each year, mostly to
irrigate crops. We are recklessly mining irreplaceable underground water
reserves. By some estimates, a third of the world’s fields are losing soil
faster than natural processes can create it. And now comes the threat of
climate change.

But bleak though the figures are, they are no worse than those in the 1960s.
Just as then, they reveal not natural limits but the current limits of our
competence, both political and technical. Feeding the world in the 21st century
requires doing things dramatically better.

The “green revolution” is still keeping pace with population. The trouble is
that consumption of grain is growing faster, driven by the world’s growing
appetite for biofuels and for meat and dairy products. Of the two billion tons
of grain grown around the world, less than half is eaten directly by people.

Paradoxically, this is good news, says U.S. demographer Joel Cohen. “We
know we can feed 10 billion people, because we are already growing enough — if
they have a vegetarian diet.” The real threat is consumption patterns, not “overpopulation.” But at
least we know the world can be fed.

A second cause for optimism is that farm yields in most of the world are a
small fraction of the potential using existing seeds. Africans typically
grow one ton of grain on a hectare, Asians grow three tons and Europeans
and North Americans upwards of five tons. Futurologist Jesse Ausubel of
Rockefeller University in New York says that “if during the next 50 years or
so, the world’s farmers reached the average yield of today’s U.S. corn grower,
ten billion could be fed with only half of today’s cropland, while they eat
today’s U.S. calories.”

That may be far-fetched. But the flipside of our reckless management of water
and soils is that we could do things so much better. Conservation farming has
vast potential to protect soils. And simple drip irrigation systems could halve
global water use by farmers. It’s not rocket science. It’s just tubes with
holes in.

Of course, it is one thing to ensure there is enough food on the global dinner
table, but quite another to make sure everyone has a seat at the table.
Subsistence farming communities make up the majority of the world’s hungry. It
matters little to them whether the global grain warehouses are full if their
village granaries are empty.

The next agricultural revolution needs to get local. It needs to help these
poor farming communities find ways to manage their own soils better by using
livestock to fertilize soils, conserving rainwater in case of drought, breeding
and exchanging local crop varieties, and finding natural predators for
troublesome pests.

In particular we are talking about Africa.
Malthusian thinking holds sway here. Many would agree with British demographic
doomster Maurice King of LeedsUniversity, who argues in an editorial he co-authored
that “large parts of sub-Saharan Africa are
demographically trapped... committed to a future of starvation and slaughter.”

But such pessimism is dangerous. It echoes the Malthusian fatalism that the
British used to excuse their inaction during the Irish potato famine a century
and a half ago: “nothing to be done... too many people... brought it on
themselves... better let the carnage play out.”

More importantly, the idea of overpopulated Africa
simply is not true. The continent contains 11 of the world’s 20 least-densely
populated nations and only one of the 20 most densely populated. Africa’s
problem is bad agriculture, not too many people.

Robert Watson, chair of the UN’s International Assessment of Agricultural
Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, which reported in 2008, says
of Africa: “Today’s hunger can be addressed
with today’s technology. It’s not a technical challenge, it’s a rural
development challenge. Farm yields across the continent can be raised from a
typical one ton per hectare to four or five tons.”

It can be done. Good news is not hard to find in Africa.
And often — as in Machakos — it is more people, not fewer, that can be the key.

Machakos is certainly not unique. In the highlands of western Kenya, the Luo
people showed me how they were replacing their fields of maize with a landscape
richer both commercially and ecologically. They had planted woodlands that
produced timber, honey, and medicinal trees. I saw napier grass, once regarded
as a roadside weed, sold as feed for cattle kept to provide milk and manure.

As the international community focuses on climate change as the great
challenge of our era, it is ignoring another looming problem — the global
crisis in land use. With agricultural practices already causing massive
ecological impact, the world must now find new ways to feed its burgeoning
population and launch a “Greener” Revolution.

In West Africa, Dutch geographer Chris Reij
has charted a similar revival since the famines of the 1970s. Again, he
says, it is labor-intensive management of the land that often holds the key.
“The idea that population pressure inevitably leads to increased land
degradation is a much repeated myth,” he says. “It does not. Innovation is
common in regions where there is high population pressure. This is not
surprising. Farmers have to adapt to survive.”

There will be exceptions — distressing situations where farmers are unable to
rescue their declining environments, and places where fast-rising populations
trigger a dangerous tailspin of decline, and where land disputes, war, and bad
government leaves communities incapable of harnessing their human resources.
But to suggest that Africa is doomed is a
dangerous lie. Demography may help drive communities to crisis, but it does not
define how they respond.

And as with Africa, so perhaps with the
planet. I bring good news: human ingenuity. Rising populations may bring more
mouths to feed, but they also bring more hands to work and brains to think. We
are not done yet.

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About Me

Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.